Niche Blogging - What is It?

The discipline of blogging has really taken off in the recent times. Now, everyone and their cousin has a blog. With so much clutter, how do you stand out from the crowd? Well, Niche Blogging is the answer.

So, what exactly is niche blogging?

To understand niche blogging, let us understand a 'Niche" first. A niche can be defined as a field of interest and expertise, suited to a particular person or a group of persons. Therefore, Niche Blogging is running a blog, which caters to the interests of a focused group. This focused group looks for specialized information and knowledge, and is served by the niche blog.

How to identify a "Niche Blog":

You can identify a niche blog by identifying the following characteristics:

1) The niche blog is primarily centers on a particular, narrowly focused theme ot topic.
2) The content of the niche blog is such that it cannot be found anywhere else. In other words, it is unique content.
3) The target audience of the niche blog is focused. It caters to the interest of a select group who are looking for more information on a topic.
4) The topic of the blog is such that it commands an appreciable amount of traffic on the various search engines. People are actively looking for the specific information regarding that topic.

Popular Niches for Blogging:

The whole buzz around blogging has really got a momentum since people have successfully started earning money using blogs. Although the successful blogs are few and far between, yet they have a common characteristic - they are focused in their topics, that is, they are niche blogs. Some of the most popular niches are:

- Making / Saving money
- Photography
- Politics
- Sports
- Gadgets
- Career
- Business
- Writing and Blogging

The above list is only an indicative one. For better success, it is advisable to specialize further. In other words, you should choose a "sub-niche". For example, photography is a very wide niche. You could choose a specific area of photography, for example, nature photography.


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The Best Blog Tool to Use

There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of different blog tools to use to get started. From WordPress and Blogger to a blog tool provided by your host and a whole myriad of free blogging tools and systems that you can download. What is best for you? Well that's the problem, what's best for you might not be what's best for the next person, so there is not one simple answer.

What's Your Blogging Purpose?

If you are blogging to earn money, which seems to be the incentive of a lot of new bloggers, then many of the free tools are out as their terms and conditions prohibit advertising and sponsored posting. But, if you are blogging to inspire yourself and income is not in question, then the free blogs have other, hidden, great advantages.

Blogging To Fitness, And Others

Many people start blogging to keep themselves following a training plan, to lose weight or to get to a race correctly trained. This is a great use of blogs and will work best if you van share your experiences with others in the same situation. For these people, going to a free community system such as Real Buzz is best. But you cannot advertise.

Blogging For An Income

However, the majority of new bloggers seem to be interested in earning through blogging, which reduces the options. Having said that,,y favourite system for blogging is using the self hosted version of WordPress. It beats, in my opinion, all other blogging tools hands down. Nothing comes near it and I even know of web designers who use it on clients websites as a Content Management Tool to install websites in no time. Its popularity is part of its success, meaning that you can download free 'Theme' and plenty of plugins to enable you to customise your blog in minutes, even if you know nothing about websites.

The downsides? Well you do need to buy a URL and hosting and install WordPress. Actually, it is not that difficult once you are used to it, it just costs you with the hosting. Some hosts have a single click installation for WordPress whilst others require you to download the files, unzip them and then FTP them to the server. But that is not that difficult.

Blogging An Income, For Free

Finally, if you really cannot face installing WordPress or cannot afford hosting and your own URL, what options are left for you? Well of the free blogging tools that I know about the only one that still allows advertising is Google's Blogger. Head over there, sign up for an account, choose your blog name and you are up and running and ready to blog. Simple!

But why doesn't everyone who is blogging for an income use Blogger? The answer is easy, many advertisers will not pay for blogs with a Blogger domain name. Therefore, you quite often still end up paying for a domain name anyway.

So, if you want to know what is the best blogging tool, then I would say WordPress, But if you want to do it for free, then there are alternatives that might be suitable, but reducing any chances of an income.

Written by Keith Lunt

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